The return of Russia as a prime global menace has recently seized the attention of world governments, but another set of issues, collectively known as “the Middle East crisis,” will continue to dominate the American and Western agenda for at least the near future. It will also demand the energies of whoever occupies the White House after George W. Bush.
The area, dubbed “the arc of crisis” by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, spans a vast region from Mauritania on the northwest African shores of the Atlantic Ocean to Pakistan on the southwestern Asian coast of the Indian Ocean. It contains almost two-thirds of the globe’s known oil reserves at a time when—as the battle over Georgia also reminds us—competition for access to fossil fuels is intensifying daily. The arc has emerged as the conduit for the biggest migratory waves in the contemporary world. It is, in addition, the busiest hub of international terror and the scene of several wars—in Sudan, Somalia, the Levant, Iraq, and Afghanistan. As the only part of the world where non-democratic, not to say proudly anti-democratic, regimes predominate, the arc represents a permanent threat to regional stability and world peace.
Relative to their populations, the nations of the arc of crisis spend a larger proportion of their gross domestic product on armament than do those anywhere else. Since the end of the Vietnam war in 1975, more Americans have died or been held hostage there than in any other region of the world. Since 2003, the arc has hosted the largest accumulations of American military personnel and war materiel outside the U.S. (and paradoxically has absorbed the biggest chunk of U.S. foreign aid). More important, perhaps, as the only part of the world where politics is defined largely through the prism of religious beliefs and aspirations, it may yet be the fount of a “clash of civilizations.” With most versions of Christianity no longer prepared to resort to violence in support of a global missionary strategy, Islam remains the only major faith with the avowed ambition of uniting the whole of humanity under its banner, by force if necessary.
So the next President is certain to find a thick Middle East dossier on his desk as soon as he enters the Oval Office. He will also inherit a whole set of attitudes for dealing with the area, attitudes that have informed, bedeviled, and tripped up generation after generation of Western statesmen and diplomats. Only by understanding—and transcending—these encrusted views can he hope to exercise a genuinely positive influence on the course of events and thereby ameliorate the ills generated by and within the region while simultaneously advancing the American national interest.
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For more than two centuries, Western nations, starting with Britain and France and followed by the United States, saw the Middle East as an important piece in a global jigsaw puzzle of contending power. As a rule, their foreign policy aimed at preventing rival governments, notably czarist Russia and Germany, from seizing control of the region. The approach to the Middle East was geostrategic rather than geopolitical. That a threat could develop from within the region, without being prompted or at least encouraged and supported by the major powers outside it, seemed inconceivable.
This approach put the emphasis on stability, which in practice meant the stability of relations between local ruling elites and Western powers. It was, for instance, in the name of such stability that, beginning in the 1920’s and continuing right up until the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, successive governments in Britain reneged on the Balfour Declaration’s promise of allowing the Jews to re-create a homeland in Palestine. The rationale was that any change in existing arrangements could push the Arab elites toward an alliance with rival powers. After World War II, this meant the Soviet bloc.
In the end, however, the stability that the Western powers had hoped to preserve and perpetuate in the region was shattered in the 1950’s and 60’s not by anything they did or failed to do but by domestic developments, as various pro-Western regimes—in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen—were overthrown by indigenous movements motivated largely by indigenous aims. The anti-British war in Aden and southern Arabia, the anti-French revolt in Algeria, and the leftist rebellions in Dhofar and the Mussandam peninsula might not have reached the intensity they did without direct or indirect Soviet support. But all of them had internal causes that the Western powers, in their obsession with maintaining an untenable status quo, had ignored.
This is hardly to say that the Soviet cold-war threat was not a real one, or that there were no grounds for the Western fear that the Soviets might use the region to increase their naval power, threaten maritime trade, or cut the flow of oil to world markets. Even today, some observers rightly point with alarm at Russian efforts to stage a comeback in the Middle East. For example, Russia is currently engaged in negotiations with Syria to secure a naval base in the port of Lattaqiyah, the stronghold of the ruling al-Assad clan. The base would replace Sebastopol, the Ukrainian port where Russia holds a lease on naval facilities until 2017 (by which point Ukraine hopes to be a member of NATO).
Yet even if Russia succeeds in building an effective presence in the eastern Mediterranean, it still would not represent a major threat to Western interests or to the U.S., which remains the world’s only blue-water naval power capable of ruling the waves, as Britannia never did. Today, the real threat to Western interests in the region comes from within, and it comes in three forms.
The first two threats are quickly stated. One comes from Sunni Salafi terrorist groups like al Qaeda and from the radical circles that help them with recruitment and financing. For the foreseeable future, the struggle against these terrorist groups is bound to entail a large military aspect, although the political aspect is no less pressing.
The second threat comes from the conservative regimes that are themselves frequent targets of the selfsame terrorists but that, in order to preserve their hold on power, have allowed or encouraged these radical elements to direct their discontent outward toward the U.S., Europe, and Israel. Often, and precisely in the name of preserving stability, the U.S. has supported these regimes, in some cases through military intervention. Thus, the U.S. has given the Egyptian regime of President Hosni Mubarak over $60 billion in direct aid since 1980, defending a status quo that has produced some of the most violent anti-American groups in the Arab world. The fact that, on at least one occasion, the Hashemite dynasty of Jordan has owed its survival to U.S. military intervention never prevented it from tolerating, if not actually encouraging, anti-American groups. And so forth.
Which brings us to the third and most direct threat. This is the one represented by Khomeinism, a proto-fascist ideology based on a radical reading of the Shiite version of Islam. On its own, and without the substantial resources of a major state like Iran, Khomeinism would have made little impression in the Middle East, where Sunni Muslims form a majority of the population. But by dint of Iran’s resources, including massive income from oil exports (estimated in 2008 to run to $180 billion), Khomeinism has proved capable of building a support base throughout the arc of crisis, helping its clients in Lebanon (Hizballah) and Gaza (Hamas) to secure positions of power and defeat their common political rivals, and furthering its hegemonic ambitions in the Persian Gulf through a network of “sleepers” within the Shiite communities of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates.
Tehran strategists appear to believe that the end of the Bush presidency offers an opportunity to fill the potential gap left by a weakening American military and political presence in the region. In this respect, the Khomeinist regime may be compared with the Prussian militarists in the early 19th century or even the Nazi regime in 1939. Like them, the Khomeinists want to dominate what they regard as their own “geopolitical habitat”—in this instance, the space between southern Asia and northern Africa—and thus to accomplish in the Middle East what Serbia failed to do in the Balkans—i.e., make the rest of the region look like themselves. That ambition is certain to lead to war—perhaps many wars. Only pre-emptive action by the United States and its allies can forestall such wars—which, with the Islamic Republic certain to acquire nuclear weapons, may assume far deadlier proportions than currently imaginable.
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During the cold war, the U.S. could follow the old paradigm to prevent Soviet domination of the Middle East. But as 9/11 showed, and as President Bush famously acknowledged, the stability supported by the U.S. had in reality become a cover for the rise of some of the world’s most rabid and de-stabilizing forces. That old one-size-fits-all model is now wholly inappropriate.
It is hard to believe how quickly this happened. Eight years ago, the Middle East scarcely featured in the election campaign that led to George W. Bush’s first term in the White House. Bill Clinton, working hard to build his legacy in the final phases of his tenure, had tried and failed to conjure up a peace accord between Israel and the Palestinian Authority under Yasir Arafat. Clinton had also tried to make a deal, somewhat pompously referred to as “The Grand Bargain,” with the Islamic Republic in Iran. The deal would have acknowledged Iran’s position as the key power in the Persian Gulf in exchange for its ceasing to support terrorist organizations and pursue nuclear weapons. Once again, nothing positive eventuated.
Why? Clinton failed to understand that in both cases he was negotiating with parties genetically programmed to reject compromise. Arafat had spent all of his adult life fighting for the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state, and was not about to transform himself into an ardent supporter of coexistence. The mullahs of Tehran had built their regime on the claim that they had a mission to lead the world away from the system created by the “infidel” and toward one based on Islamic values. They were not about to retreat to a corner of the globe and a minor role scripted by the American “Great Satan.”
Since 9/11, the U.S. has made a bold start in a more promising direction, in large part by resolving to deal with the countries in the region as they are, individually, and to devise policy accordingly. The intervening years, dominated by American preoccupation with Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran—with the Arab-Israeli problem fading almost into the background—have seen great upheaval, have sparked many hopeful developments, and have left much unfinished business.
To start with the positive, the region has been rid of two dangerous and evil regimes. Together, the Taliban “emirate” in Kabul and the Baathist regime in Baghdad had not only provoked several civil and regional wars but had emerged, alongside the Islamic Republic in Iran, as the principal protectors of terrorist gangs. Bush’s readiness to take military action sent a powerful political message: the United States, a guarantor of the regional status quo since the 1940’s, was prepared to act as a force for change.
And the Bush administration did promote such change, almost wholly for the better. In so doing, moreover, it persuaded many of the region’s conservative ruling elites to consider the possibility of reform themselves. Almost all have added some form of representation to their respective nations’ political mix. In addition to Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which under U.S. supervision have conducted a series of referendums and elections, establishing national sovereignty as the basic principle of their political systems and popular will as the main source of their legitimacy, the oil-rich Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf have also moved toward some form of constitutional government, not least by abandoning the fiction that the Qur’an is constitution enough.
In the past eight years, the sultanates of Oman and Bahrain have held three sets of reasonably free and fair elections for consultative assemblies that could, in time, develop into bona-fide parliaments. Kuwait, which already has a bona-fide parliament, has extended the suffrage to women and held three successive free elections. Even Saudi Arabia, despite its suspicion of Western-style politics, has agreed to broaden decision-making at the local level by organizing municipal elections. Thanks to “people power,” Syria was forced in 2005 to end its 29-year-long military occupation of Lebanon. In Egypt, the ruling party has accepted a measure of power-sharing, and President Mubarak has grudgingly submitted to the first multi-candidate presidential election in Egypt’s history.
While many have dismissed President Bush’s democratization talk as nothing but rhetoric, there is, in fact, evidence that he has succeeded in putting the issue of democracy at the center of political debate in the Middle East. In the 1950’s, the big theme in the region was nationalism and anti-colonialism. In the 1960’s it was pan-Arabism and, to a lesser extent, socialism. In the 1970’s, the main theme was Islamism, both Sunni and Shiite. In the past seven years, democracy has taken its place.
Even an avowedly anti-democratic regime like the Islamic Republic in Iran has reworked its political vocabulary to inject a democratic tone, albeit with the adjective “Islamic” attached. A generation ago, secular despotism was the established order in Iran, Islamism the challenger. Now that Islamism is in power, democracy is the challenger and, by implication, the wave of the future.
Another positive element is the defeat inflicted on the numerous terrorist groups collectively known as Al Qaeda in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan. It may well be that this deadliest of the Salafi terrorist movements has started a historic decline from which it will not recover. What is certainly clear is that the underlying mood in the Arab countries has shifted. Groups that once welcomed a flood of recruits are now finding it difficult or impossible to attract new “volunteers for martyrdom.” They have also been running out of money, as the flow of donations from wealthy businessmen and emirs in the Persian Gulf has dwindled to a trickle.
The Bush administration can also take pride in having prevented terrorists from mounting a successful repeat attack inside U.S. territory. Despite dozens of attempts, some reportedly designed to be deadlier than 9/11, al Qaeda and copycat groups have failed to penetrate fortress America. And this has led to a strategic debate within the terrorist world itself. Some, including Osama bin Laden or his impersonator, continue to regard attacks on the American mainland as a matter of high priority. Others, like Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu-Bakr Naji, key theoreticians of al Qaeda, have argued for a more local approach, suggesting that jihad should focus on Muslim governments and be cultivated within Muslim communities in Europe.
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That, however, reminds us of what remains to be done. In Iraq, President Bush may yet sign an agreement on the status of U.S. and allied forces beyond the December expiration of their United Nations mandate. Yet would any such agreement be secure? At home, no matter who is elected President, a U.S. Senate with an even stronger Democratic majority than the present one is hardly guaranteed to endorse a strategic agreement negotiated by Bush. And the agreement could also be challenged on the Iraqi side, especially if, as most opinion polls indicate, the current coalition government led by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is not returned to power in the 2009 general election.
There is also much that is worrisome in Afghanistan. Seven years after 9/11, the latest security estimates show that the Taliban and allied groups, including remnants of al Qaeda, have established or re-established a presence in fourteen of the country’s 29 provinces. Meanwhile, President Hamid Karzai’s administration in Kabul appears gripped by corruption, political fatigue, and a loss of moral authority. To complicate matters further, America’s NATO allies, far from providing needed additional troops and resources, have been looking for ways of reducing their commitment to the Afghan campaign.
In Pakistan, the departure of President Pervez Musharraf may have little or no effect on the lagging battle against terrorism there. Signs abound that pro-Islamist elements within the military, and more specifically in the security services collectively known as ISI, have resumed their support for terrorist groups not only in Pakistan itself but also in India and Afghanistan. A series of terrorist operations in India in July and a spectacular attack against Chinese police in Xingjian (East Turkistan) in August, not to mention several suicide attacks claiming over 100 lives in Pakistan itself, come as vivid reminders of the regional threat posed by terrorism generated in parts of Afghanistan and the Pakistani “badlands.”
In Yemen, terrorist groups linked to al Qaeda have tried to compensate for losses in Iraq by acquiring safe havens in the south of the country. Al Qaeda is also trying to establish itself as a major force in North Africa: this year, several Algerian groups merged with al Qaeda to set up a terrorist outfit with branches in Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, and Mauritania. In August alone, over 80 people were killed in Algeria in suicide attacks claimed by Al Qaeda in Maghreb.
The 2006 war between Israel and the Lebanese branch of Hizballah transformed that Iran-controlled group into a key player in Lebanon and an even greater threat to Israeli security. This past spring, Hizballah sent its fighters into Christian districts of Beirut, obliging the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora to grant it an effective veto on all key decisions. Consolidating its position as a state within a state, Hizballah has purchased whole villages from Lebanese Christians and Druze for future settlement by Shiites—the idea being to create territorial contiguity among the Shiite-majority areas of Beirut, the Bekaa valley, and the region south of the Litani River. With money from Iran, Hizballah is also building a network of fiber-optic communications beyond the control of the Lebanese state. The “party” also controls Beirut airport and owns its own jetties and docks in the Lebanese capital’s port, enabling it to import and export whatever it wants without the approval of government authorities. The emergence of a Hizballah-dominated mini-state in Lebanon, coupled with Hamas’s control of Gaza, puts Israel in the middle of a pincer ultimately controlled by Tehran.
As for the reinvigorated Islamic Republic of Iran itself, the regime has good reason to believe it has won the first round against the “Great Satan” by preserving its nuclear program in the teeth of international pressure and UN-imposed sanctions. At the same time, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s tough anti-American rhetoric and promise to wipe Israel off the map has resonated loudly in areas far beyond Iran’s borders. A poll conducted by the liberal Ibn Khaldun foundation in Cairo identified Ahmadinejad, a figure increasingly disliked at home, as the most popular foreign leader for Egyptians. Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the Lebanese branch of Hizballah, came second.
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In sum, the next U.S. administration faces a daunting task in the Middle East. But consider again what it has to build on, and what clarifying advantages have accrued. As of January 2001, the U.S. political establishment still had no appreciation of the threat that was taking shape in the region. Sunni Salafi terrorists were regarded as weirdos engaged in criminal activities, to be stopped by the FBI. Democracy was thought of as a Western luxury that Muslims could not afford or did not need. The Khomeinist regime in Tehran was seen as an oddity, a system dominated by mullahs obsessed with beards and hijabs.
The new administration, by contrast, will not be walking blindly into a minefield. It will know, for instance, that the United States, whether it likes it or not, is still at war—and, in a sense, has been at war since 1979 when Khomeinist “students” raided the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held its diplomats hostage. And it will know that the forces dedicated to killing Americans and challenging the United States’ global leadership role cannot be placated but have to be confronted and ultimately defeated.
The next administration will also know that, as long as democracy is not established in the Middle East, the region will remain a source of threats to the West. Thus, democratization is an imperative of American national security. Fortunately, for the first time since the constitutional revolutions of Turkey and Iran in the early decades of the last century, it is also a live option in the Middle East itself. The small but growing constituency of genuine democrats that has emerged in virtually all states of the region, together with other moderate, conservative, and traditional but non-violent forces, could—if adequately supported by the United States—offer a real alternative to the despotic regimes that are the ultimate seedbeds of violent radicalism.
Democratization is all the more urgently needed because the Middle East risks becoming a center for nuclear proliferation—with Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and maybe even Syria following Iran’s drive to acquire an arsenal of atomic warheads. This could open the door in turn to what is known as “retail proliferation,” with nuclear arms finding their way into the hands of terrorists across the globe.
In this connection, it is well to emphasize something else the next administration should know: namely, that the Israel-Palestinian issue, although of symbolic importance, is ultimately far from being the region’s main problem. To the contrary, obsessive focus on this issue has served as a means of avoiding other, more pressing ones: misrule, fanaticism, economic underdevelopment, social and cultural oppression. These problems existed before Israel came into being and, unless they are solved, will continue to haunt the region and generate terrorism long after a Palestinian state appears or fails to appear on the map.
In short, as in the cold war between Western liberal democracy and Soviet totalitarianism, the fight in the Middle East is ultimately an ideological one. On the one side there is the Western ideology of human rights, pluralism, democracy, and the rule of law. On the other side there is the obscurantist Islamist ideology of Khomeini and Osama bin Laden, together with its less defined variations, all marked by the rejection of the modern world and by dreams of global conquest. No amount of material aid and commercial cooperation can, on its own, defeat that ideology, although both economic aid and trade can be powerful tools in the struggle. It is on the political field of battle that Islamism, like its predecessor Soviet Communism, must eventually experience its strategic defeat.
This also means that one of the first tasks of the next President will also be to win the battle of hearts and minds inside the U.S. itself. For nothing could so cripple the successful prosecution of the struggle abroad as continued dissension at home, of the kind that has disfigured the American political debate over Iraq and the war on terror. By the same token, nothing would go farther toward ensuring ultimate victory in the long struggle ahead than the perception abroad that the United States is a power capable of deploying its resources in pursuit of clear policy objectives backed by both main political parties and enjoying the steady support of the American people.
